The Point: Better Grades! No Dope

August 4, 2017

Whoa, dude, what a concept. For the Colson Center, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

In order to curb drug tourism, a city in the Netherlands banned foreigners from cannabis cafes.

This hit foreign students at the local University pretty hard. So much so that researchers discovered that those who lost access to legal marijuana started performing better in school.

In the “thank you, Captain Obvious” department, the Washington Post reports that “the researchers attribute their results to the students who were denied legal access to marijuana being less likely to use it and to suffer cognitive impairments . . . as a result.”

As one researcher put it, this study is extremely valuable because it looked at “similar people in a similar location,” that is Dutch students and foreign students at the same university. This allowed researchers to “isolate the effect of marijuana legalization.”

Sound methodology, sound conclusion: or to paraphrase a certain movie character, “fat, stoned, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

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Phoenix1977

“As one researcher put it, this study is extremely valuable because it looked at “similar people in a similar location,” that is Dutch students and foreign students at the same university.” However, they’re not similar people. Dutch student only work hard enough to get a C-, because that will get them passed the course. Foreign students, in general, work quite a bit harder.

And the access to cababis might be harder but (foreign) students still use just as much as before. They only have to go through more trouble go get it.

Steve

So it was just a coincidence that the grades of the foreign students went up when the cannabis was harder to get? Sure, some of them were still able to get it, but logic would suggest that it was used less and by fewer. Where is your data that foreign students use just as much as before? You dismiss data from studies that you don’t like but throw out anecdotes to support your positions. Why is it that Dutch students don’t work harder?

Phoenix1977

I teach classes at both the Free Univeristy and the University of Amsterdam. Trust me when I say the students, both foreign and domestic, are just as high as they always were. Dutch students don’t work harder because they have nothing to gain from it. An A+ gets you the same mark as a C-: “passed”. And since Dutch universities don’t give out transcripts a student studying hard for A and A+ marks gets the exact same diploma as a student with only C- grades. So why bother?

Steve

Sad to hear that they don’t strive to do better, they do just enough to get by. Don’t you think that if they got better grades that would be indicative of a better grasp of the subject material?